Reading Notes: Nursery Rhymes, Reading A

 

("The Escaping Man" by L. Leslie Brooke via Myth UN-Textbook)

The section of the reading that I chose to focus my reading notes on for this post is “Nursery Rhymes: Tales” by Andrew Lang (1897). This section of the Mythology UN-Textbook focused on mostly nursery rhymes, but I chose to focus on the Tales section as I enjoyed the little stories told in each rhyme. As the name implies, each one of these the stories in this section rhyme. However, the way they rhyme differed between each story as one story could have one line rhyme with the very next line after it and another story could have one line rhyme with another line that is two lines after it. In general, the stories in this section are short in terms of a story but compared with the other nursery rhymes in the other sections, these stories are on the longer side. The punctuation of the stories is also quite interesting as the lines are not complete sentences and end with a comma rather than a period. I think that this type of punctuation actually makes the nursery rhymes more fun to read than a long story and I am not sure if it’s only me, but I read all these nursery rhymes with a kind of beat of how the sentences should flow. There are a lot of short stories in this section and their titles all correspond to the main characters in each nursery rhyme. One final interesting thing that I thought about this section is that in each nursery rhyme, the first words of the rhyme are almost always the title and the very first word is always capitalized. I have no idea why the author did this, but I thought that it was very interesting.